BY BRUCE M. CONFORTH PH. D., BEN L. MINNIFIELD, AND DR. TANYA SCOTT
—
ROBERT JOHNSON BLUES FOUNDATION
Blues music has its origin in the work songs sung by
slaves in the southern states of America. During slavery,
Africans adapted to using the leftovers of plantation
owners as mechanisms for survival and entertainment.
They also used their own traditions to transform the
American cultural landscape. The cultural relationship
of slave and slave owner was complex and often a
give-and-take exchange. From foodways (using cast-off
pig intestines to create the delicacy of chitterlings),
to architecture (slaves introduced the “front porch” to
America), to folk medicine and traditions, slave culture
brought much to American life.
Music was a particularly interesting area of exchange.
Although slave owners often encouraged musical
expression among their slaves, believing a misguided
rationale that a singing slave was a happy slave, they
also felt instruments could be used to communicate
secret messages that would lead to rebellion. The 1739
South Carolina slave codes, for instance, were the first
to ban drumming among slaves for fear that the rhythms
would foment insurrection. However, the African musical
tradition slaves brought to the New World included much
more than just drums. There was a rich African tradition
of stringed instruments, from the one-string fiddle to the
multi-stringed kora. Perhaps the most important of these
African retentions was the banjar, which would morph
into the banjo
—
oddly enough, an instrument that would
become associated with Anglo-American folk music and
ultimately one of the signature sounds of the proto-typical
white roots music “bluegrass.”
After slavery, though still under the oppression of
Jim Crow and segregation, the power of song and
music provided a base for inspiration and entertainment.
America’s earliest documentation of songs from this era
is found in Allen, Ware, and Garrison’s 1867 book,
Slave
Songs of the United States.
In this seminal text, we see
work and secular songs, as well as the spiritual roots that
would eventually form the blues. This early documentation
speaks to music used to open the core of a person’s soul
through verse and instrumentation, and explore the pain
and pleasure of living. This is the basis of the blues.
“If the blues tell stories about life experiences
revolving around race, love, and social class,
then these instruments provide the background
upon which those stories were sung.”
8
Handmade Music FactorY
It is no accident that at the same time African
Americans were creating the lyrical and musical roots
for the blues, they were also creating their own ad hoc
musical instruments. The earliest extant examples of cigar
box guitars, for example, stem from this period (although
reported history dates them to just before the Civil War).
By the 1880s, plans to build simple cigar box banjoes
were appearing in print. While there were, of course, white
children who also built their own homemade instruments,
the particular poverty of the southern Black made such
creations more of a necessity than a social curiosity. If you
were a young southern Black growing up on a plantation,
and you wanted to learn to play guitar, it was almost a
given that you’d have to make one yourself. And this is
precisely what Robert Johnson, and so many before and
after him, did.
Johnson’s childhood friends recall how he took three
strings of baling wire and nailed them to the side of the
sharecropping shack he shared with his mother, Julia,
and stepfather, Dusty Willis, in Commerce, Mississippi.
Johnson slid two bottles under the wires to increase the
tension, and then picked out tunes on his homemade
diddley bow. And while those same friends said they
couldn’t make any sense out of what he was playing, no
doubt to the young Robert it was pure music. It wasn’t
long after that that Robert got his first guitar, but the roots
of his music had been laid on the homemade diddley bow.
The
